Keitai: Mobile Boom, Computer Doom?

17042007

In Japan, the number of 20-year-olds accessing the Internet with a personal computer has been in constant decline for several years. Last year, only 11.9% of Japanese 20-year-olds used a PC to go online. According to this article from The Age, one of Australia’s most reputable newspapers, “For Australian mobile phone users, who use technology evolved from – but inferior to – that in Japan, this is a glimpse into the near future. … Accessing the internet has become so fast and easy with Japan’smobile phones that many young people have forsaken computers.“

Will ubiquitous handheld computing will be the dominant information systems paradigm of the next 20 years, just as the Personal Computer has been for the last 20; and room-sized supercomputers and mainframes, were for the 20 before that?

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3 responses

Yes, this will and is flowing on to other countries. The scary thing I see as an educator is that most schools are still barely maintaining desktop labs, yet alone getting into mLearning devices in any significant way. Meanwhile, whenever such devices do appear, they get banned (understandably at times).

I see this more of an opportunity than a threat. All these years we have seen e-learning start off with a bang but it never really caught on as much as it could have, due to a variety of reasons. One of the reasons, was the low computer penetration during the early days of e-learning. Now we have the mobile revolution already here, with every man, woman and child having a mobile phone. New features are being added almost daily, to an ever increasing range of models. Now is the time to act and get m-learning off the ground! The teens are anyway inseparable from their mobiles and we should find a way to integrate learning content into mobile phones soon.

The biggest problem with all the “Mobile-will-replace-the-PC” forecast is the size of the mobile display. As long as mobile phone displays are much smaller and have lesser resolution than a PC, it cannot really be a threat to the PCs dominance. However I have seen photos of devices that are attached to mobile phones that can “project” the displays on a larger surface like a wall or a table. If this becomes ubiquitous, then yes, the mobile will replace a PC. Until then howevr the PC still rules the roost!